Off we go into the wild blue meander with "Flyboys," an inflated wannabe epic about the American aviators of Lafayette Escadrille in the First World War.

The movie is one of those weird retro numbers, in which millions are spent on technology so that the final product looks as though it were made in 1930. Go figure. It combines state-of-the-art computer graphics to create in cyberspace what Howard Hughes created in real space in "Hell's Angels" in 1930. Indeed, the move re-creates one of "Hell's Angels's" stunners of the early '30s, an airplane vs. zeppelin shootout at 10,000 feet high; yet, like most of "Flyboys," it's so overdone it becomes almost goofy, particularly when a stricken Lafayette fighter piloted by the inevitable doomed nobleman slides backward into the big hydrogen-puffed air-wagon, creating a fireball not seen since Krakatoa.

If only someone had worked as hard on the script. Filled with almost-names (James Franco being the most prominent), it examines the history of the volunteer group attached to the French flying force before we went Over There. We get the cowboy who falls in love with a French farm girl and lands in one of her pastures in the dead of night to rescue her from the Germans! Yikes, not even Hughes's gutty stunt pilots would try to land a plane at night in a pasture -- yet again twice, as this screenplay demands.

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring. The computer technology enables the pretenders to let the machine gun bullets leak vapors as they roar through the air so that one has a sense of the presence of the lead fleets as they track the unlucky. And the planes -- since they are made entirely of electrons -- can careen dangerously close to each other. It's thrilling when it's not stupefying.

-- Stephen Hunter (Sep. 22, 2006)

Contains intense battle action.